Yeah yeah, you knew all along. Whatever, I’ll self-own with this post, I’ve already taken nothing but Ls over the last year.

The first segment of last night’s Super Bowl halftime show featured Lady Gaga singing and speaking the Pledge of Allegiance from atop the stadium roof, before “jumping” 265 feet to be lowered to the stage. It was a cool moment!

GIF

What it was not, was live. Videos taken from the stands show her already suspended on wires and being lowered to the field when the video cut off on the Jumbotron and the lights went up. She did not leap from the roof, and wasn’t even up there on Sunday.

So, yes, of course they taped the intro. Not just for ease of production, but because no one involved wants to risk Lady Gaga pulling an Owen Hart in front of the single largest TV audience ever. It wasn’t a huge secret, either—an article explaining how they got all those remote-control helicopters to hover in formation noted, with no more detail, that “it taped the show earlier this week.”

Advertisement

This was one of those things that was obvious if you took a moment to think about it, but I did not take the moment to think about it. A quick Twitter poll indicates that 71 percent of voters did not realize the segment was pretaped, so don’t feel dumb if you got taken. I don’t! (A caveat on the poll: Our readers are really dumb.)

A still-unsolved mystery: Where did Lady Gaga go after finishing her performance by leaping from the stage and catching a football? Maybe she’s falling still... (Update: Or she landed in a foam dumpster.)